How do you know when a poem is finished?
When you want to add a stanza, a word, an image, tinker, but the poem just doesn’t let you. The music simply stops. You read the poem out loud and there is a natural “final note” if you will. With a finished poem, I often come back to it a few days later and re-read it to make sure it really is finished. Most of the time my instincts are right. I suppose after writing for decades, you know, on a gut level, when a poem is done. The great thing about finishing a poem is that there is always another one on the horizon.
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